Detroit Is No Dry Bones: The Eternal City of the Industrial Age

By Camilo Jose Vergara

Over the past 25 years, award-winning ethnographer and photographerCamilo José Vergara has traveled annually to Detroit to document notonly the city's precipitous decline but also how its residents havesurvived. From the 1970s through the 1990s, changes in Detroit werealmost all for the worse, as the fabric of the city was erased throughneglect and abandonment. But over the last decade, Detroit has seen thebeginnings of a positive transformation, and the photography in Detroit Is No Dry Bonesprovides unique documentation of the revival and its urbanisticpossibilities. Beyond the fate of the city's buildings themselves,Vergara's camera has consistently sought to capture the distinct cultureof this largely African American city. The photographs in this book,for example, are organized in part around the way people have re-usedand re-purposed structures from the past. Vergara is unique in hisdocumentation of local churches that have re-occupied old bank buildingsand other impressive structures from the past and turned them intosomething unexpectedly powerful architecturally as well as spiritually.